The reality is, my job, much as I like it, much as everything appears to be going well (as in the squeaky wheel gets the oil, and I have seen no oil cans heading my way) much as everything seems to be trickling along nicely, could end tomorrow.

It could end for a variety of reasons, from a management decision that wipes out 10% of the staff overnight, to a single line manager decision that for some (real or imagined) reason my face doesn’t fit.

Pretty much all you can do is enjoy it while you can, and certainly not worry about what it takes to be a better employee with more job security.

Now, if I talked about being a better boyfriend / husband with better relationship security, y’all would be chanting “Beta $, Alpha fucks”

But the fact is, it is true, I can no more make my self an attractive boyfriend to a wimminz who just ain’t interested, no matter what I have to offer, than I can make myself an attractive employee to a company that just ain’t interested, no matter what I have to offer.

The parallels are exact.

I don’t *want* my job to end, but the reality is I can no more influence that than I can the weather, all I *can* do, is do my job, the same as I did on my first day, no less, and no more.

The reality is that employers can and do bail on great employees as arbitrarily and unfairly as wives bail on great husbands and fathers, and there is *nothing* that you can do as a man to either influence that decision, or influence the relative value that you are assigned as a part of that decision making.

We had an *incident* at work recently, and you have to remember “work” is reseller > client > us > various departments in our place > me actually turning up on site.

The incident is I did everything I was told, to the letter, and fulfilled both the letter and the spirit of my contract, and yet, the job didn’t end up with a working widget, and nobody was happy, and so everyone started in on the blame game, and by the way I am talking global brands here… not mom and pop’s lemonade stand.

Since I was the only fucker who had actually been on site, naturally I was the only suspect in the murder case, and naturally I have not been included in the loop in all the hand wringing and blame game and no, you pay, we ain’t paying, horse-shit and horse-trading.

Bottom line?

Bottom line is two layers and seventeen levels away in the layer cake, the reseller was in possession of some data, and despite three explicit opportunities to provide this data, one of which was when I personally called their 3rd line support to ask if I was missing anything, it was never provided.

It was never provided because there were so many layers in their own organisation, nobody saw the whole picture, and nobody had any incentive to wonder what if anything was on the pieces of jigsaw that they could not see, eg the other 4,999 pieces that make up the whole.

Nor was the system itself designed in such a way as to fail gracefully, if it did not find the *thing* it wanted, all it would do is reboot, endlessly, no diagnostics, no error messages, no output, nothing.

By now it is obvious, it’s a software fault, it could be a crypto key or a TPM tie in or a licence file, it doesn’t matter, the bitch has been written to look for this shit as an integral part of the boot process, and if it doesn’t find it, reboot instantly and try again.

Which is great with 20/20 hindsight, but the people who provided this system and who resold our engineers as their own to the end user and who approved the purchase of parts that amounted to a complete new system, never though to tell the field engineer (me) this, even when he asked.

No, much easier to wait for it to go wrong and start playing the blame game.

Of course, when I point all this out, because, you know, that is the job of the field engineer, to join all the dots that everyone on higher salaries sat in their offices already has, and suddenly the blame game is reversed and all agree that actually yours truly didn’t fuck up, and the reseller will foot the bill in full, and my employer says to me you are quite right….

Yeah, and fair play to y’all for admitting it and not actually blaming me the instant the reseller tried to dump on me, but, the fact is if y’all could do *your* fucking jobs properly in the first place it would never have gotten this far.

Y’all should have been, hey reseller, our guy did, exactly and to the letter, what he was told to do and authorised to do by you, now fuck off and pay up. Any fuck up ain’t with us or our guy.

As the beta boyfriend / husband / father, it isn’t my fucking job to point out to you where you or your friends or advisers are wrong about me.

As a man with my self employed hat on, said reseller would be on my blacklist for life, not for fucking up and not telling the field engineer relevant data, but for trying to blame him as a first resort, rather than FIRST trying to identify what went wrong and where and how.

***THIS***

As a lowly employee, no doubt I’ll be doing another job for this reseller soon.

Interestingly, and notably, my fellow field engineers instantly knew that I was seriously pissed off with the whole thing, despite remaining outwardly utterly professional and calm, and as soon as they knew the facts they all sided with me 100%

Interestingly also, they all also equally apportioned the blame between our employer and the reseller, I heard more than once “redacted are known for always trying to blame everyone else.”

Learn the lesson WOPR learned, many games are un-winnable, to play is to lose.

To try to be a good employee is to lose.

To try to be a good boyfriend / husband / father is to lose.

My company DO NOT WANT an uber mega kick-ass cool slick mother-fucker of a field engineer, if they did they woulda hired one, at 20x my current salary.

Same with bitches, you want a great man you’ll hire one, you are master of this house and of me.

*THEN* you can fucking complain when your employee doesn’t live up to spec, or your man doesn’t put food on the table or coal in the hearth, as per the original bill of goods.

Trying not to be a squeaky wheel is one thing, trying to be a teflon coated hub motor 100 kW drive wheel will get you sacked, part not suitable for role.

The HR bitch DOES NOT FUCKING GET IT, pathetic little circular mails about employee of the week and Fred has had such good feedback from acme corp and don’t y’all wanna compete with Fred and be even more alpha and uber than he is?

NO

I

FUCKING

DON’T

In my ideal world you won’t even have heard of me bitch, in fact in my ideal world the only people in the company who even know I exist would be three or four people in the service department who assign me work, and the fucking payroll computer.

We have quite a few ex military types, you can see the look on their faces, like being smacked across the face with a fresh wet halibut, when I say shit to them.

I’ll get emails circulars from them about company policy and procedures and looking good for clients, and email circulars from HR about who got prizes for the best fucking Halloween costume at work, so I’ll ask them when they were on patrol in Helmand Province, was it the Afghans or the Brass who formed the judging panel for the best Halloween outfit while on patrol?

Did they have a dress down Friday where everyone went out on patrol in denim and cheesecloth and the wimminz soldiers looked like they were clubbing?

Did they hire people from the job-centre in Watford and tell them to make their own way to Kandahar, DHL should be delivering your weapons and ammo on-site for a pre-midday and you got to look for a guy wearing an aqualung who answers to the name of Trevor and fix whatever it is he says needs fixing so you can get your paperwork signed and we all get paid?

Gotta be careful who you say this shit to though…. real careful… or you’ll be seen as the squeaky wheel.

Fuck all you can do to improve your lot, as an employee or as a beta boyfriend, but plenty you can do to fuck it up…. and 99% of that will come from trying to improve your lot, or your status. or what others think of you.

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Looking back I´m ALMOST amazed how everything in our society teaches you the exact opposites to these truths.
So that the gullible “good guys” have pretty much no chance but to fail spectacularly at everything.

Of course for quite a while now I have ceased to be amazed at these traps in the system. As it´s designed from the get go(aka. kindergarden) to have you fail and become just another cog in the fail-machine.

There is nothing more dangerous to “them” than a competent man.
And fuck me if that “them” doesn´t include ALL wimminz too.